Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (15 page)

At this point, the Procurator Catus Decianus, he ‘whose rapacity had driven the province to war’ as Tacitus pointed out, exercised the traditional prerogative of the rat and fled the rapidly sinking ship. He took with him not only all his papers, but all his officers: Roman Britain was now without an administrative structure of any sort, and still the Governor Suetonius, hastening from Mona, had yet to arrive to save the situation – or so it was hoped.

Tacitus tells us that Suetonius was ‘undismayed’. That was just as well. He certainly made excellent speed in his 250-mile dash towards Londinium since he managed to reach it in advance of the British hordes from Camulodunum (a mere sixty-three miles away).
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Or perhaps the natural if damaging British concentration on plunder following the sack of the veterans’ wealthy city was already weakening their original determination to extirpate the Roman rule. It was the element of surprise which had enabled the British tribal forces to slaughter Petilius’ well-equipped and well-trained men of the IX
^th
Legion. Since the Governor of Britain could hardly be expected to linger in western Mona once the startling news of the fall of Camulodunum reached him, it might have been as well for the Britons to employ the element of surprise once again, either by ambushing Petilius, or by occupying Londinium itself. But this was not to be.

So Suetonius reached Londinium unscathed, and reached it some short time ahead of the Britons; but it was an interval at least long enough for him to appraise the situation with his accustomed quick intelligence. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had pressed on towards Londinium with the original intention of using it as a military stronghold. But it is important to realize, as Suetonius soon discovered, that Londinium at this point was not actually a fortified city. Nor for that matter was it the capital city of Roman Britain, a fact which may be difficult for twentieth-century Britons to appreciate, trained by long historical usage to think of London as the centre of their world at least, and perhaps of other worlds as well.

*

If not a military stronghold, what was the nature of the city to which Suetonius had hastened, and at which the marauding and triumphant Britons would soon arrive? Despite all the recent archaeological activity in this area, the exact origin of Londinium has not yet been established beyond all possibility of doubt.
⁸
Caesar does not mention Londinium at all in his account of the second (54
BC
) campaign in the course of which he crossed the Thames; while it was the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth who was responsible for spreading the enduring legend of a pre-Roman city, something for which there is no support from archaeology. Since the name Londinium itself does derive from something pre-Roman, it was perhaps some obscure farm on a bend of the river which gave its name forever to the future mighty conurbation.
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Be that as it may, the archaeological evidence indicates that Londinium as known in the first century owed its foundation to the Romans. There are two main theories: the first suggests that Londinium was founded as a military base at the time of the Claudian invasion of 43. The second envisages it as ‘a carefully planned civil trading settlement of Roman merchants’. It is the lack of military equipment among the discoveries unearthed which argues against the theory of the military base: unlike Colchester, for example, which is known to have been established in the first place as a fortification before being transformed into a
colonia
, and where a plethora of military remains have been turned up. The military argument cannot however be conclusively demolished. For one thing, the new settlement undeniably occupied a situation of strategic importance: it would make sense if its earliest Roman use was in fact as a place of river crossing, and that would suppose some form of military presence.
¹⁰

The dating of the coins however suggests a town which began to flourish from about
AD
50 onwards. Recent archaeological work has indeed tended to reinforce the notion of a town planned from the first and rapidly expanding. Traces of a major north-east–south-west Roman road have been revealed in Southwark, crossing the Thames just below the modern London Bridge (and
above the mediaeval one). This is in addition to the long-known major east–west road, nine metres wide, which has been replaced by the modern Cheapside, but parts of which have been integrated into Lombard Street and Fenchurch Street. Traces of this north–south road, on the north bank of the Thames, were found in the winter of 1984/5 in King Street, between the Guildhall and St Paul’s; already in the
AD
50s it was attended by thriving shops.

There are also traces of a central square, probably a market square, under Gracechurch Street, as well as these broad roads, and although the Boudican destruction followed by Roman reconstruction makes it impossible to be certain, there may well have been an early temple; if so, it would notionally lie beneath the site of that temple, recently rediscovered, which is dated about
AD
70. We know that there was at least one large building, a Roman version of a modern shopping mall; this had a deep verandah or portico running along in front of it, obviously intended for a series of different shops, which indicates that the Roman version of the developers were also present.

‘Boudican’ Londinium spread over thirty acres at least and may have had as many as thirty thousand inhabitants.
¹¹
The limits of the city are indicated by various factors including, of course, those fire deposits which provide brutal evidence of how soon all this development was to be suddenly and violently shattered. The siting of the Roman cemeteries of this period is also important, since they had by law to lie outside the bounds of the city. Londinium in these early days would have centred round modern Lombard Street where it is bisected by Gracechurch Street, and continues into Fenchurch Street, with the findspots of shards and so forth heavily grouped near Leadenhall Market. A stream, later named the Walbrook, flowed through it, (its course lying beneath the modern Bank of England and Mansion House). The eastern limits of Londinium would have been not much further than Mincing Lane; the Fleet from which modern Fleet Street takes its name, then a navigable river, must have acted as a virtual boundary in the west.

Unlike hapless Camulodunum, the first British
colonia
, and the
municipium
of Verulamium to which Boudica’s army would shortly turn its attentions, Londinium had as yet no official status. This is the description given to us by Tacitus: Londinium ‘did not rank as a Roman settlement, but was an important centre for businessmen and merchandise’. The word which Tacitus uses for businessmen,
negotiatores
– bankers or those engaged in financial transactions as opposed to
mercatores
, merchants – suggests incidentally that Londinium in its occupational use in
AD
60 was not so far from that of the City of London, which now occupies more or less the same area.
¹²

Although lacking a charter, the city may have enjoyed some kind of self-government under military control.
¹³
For whatever the origins of the site, it is clear that by
AD
60 a teeming energetic cosmopolitan city, connected with Europe and beyond, full of confidence in its commercial future, occupied it. Londinium at this point should not be regarded as a ‘British’ city. It may have been temporarily swollen with British refugees, given the impending arrival of the Boudican army, already laying waste the countryside of the Thames between Camulodunum and their new target. But the city was not a natural focus for any particular British tribe, as the fact that it had taken a Roman foundation to conjure it into existence bears witness.
¹⁴

The cosmopolitan nature of this busy community is on the contrary well illustrated by the kind of belongings and household objects it left behind, many of them luxuries which had to be imported from some far-flung town or country. Objects have been found as geographically diverse as red-pottery tableware from southern Italy, still showing traces of Vesuvian ash, amphorae, probably containing olive oil, from the Seville region of southern Spain, smaller amphorae for wine from Rhodes, and glassware from Syria. Here were wealthy merchants, already beginning to live in the kind of comfortable lifestyle they had enjoyed at home, not necessarily Roman, but from the easeful Mediterranean. As with Camulodunum, a growing body of expatriates had come to profit from the opportunities presented by the new Roman province,
serenely confident that the graph of their prosperity must inevitably soar with the passage of time.

Then Suetonius arrived from Mona, took one look at Londinium and decided to abandon it to the enemy. The town, he believed, could not be defended and the horrifying recent experience of Petilius left him disinclined to emulate that commander’s rashness; he was well aware of the inferior numbers of his own men compared to those of the Britons. It was better to live to fight another day. As Tacitus coolly and succinctly expressed it: ‘He decided to save the whole situation by the sacrifice of a single city.’ It was a radical and unsentimental solution.

In vain those about to be sacrificed – civilians all – prayed and wept not to be left to their fate. Suetonius gave the signal for departure. The brave Roman cavalry clattered away. The legionaries, those that there were, marched off. The able-bodied must have tried, many of them, to leave with him. At any rate, ‘those who could keep up with him’ were given a place. Others would have escaped up the waterway of the Thames to the safer territories of the Atrebates, with their capital at Silchester and their king Cogidubnus, like Cartimandua of the Brigantes, friendly to the Roman interests.
¹⁵
But there remained behind in Londinium, according to Tacitus, all those who could not travel, either because of their sex, or because they were too old (or, as he might have added, too young). And there was a third category, equally poignant from the point of view of the historian, of those who remained behind voluntarily because they were ‘attached to the place’. Already it seems the city had its inveterate inhabitants, who if not native Britons, were in another sense already Londoners: these too stayed behind as centuries later Londoners would refuse to leave their homes during the Great Plague, the Great Fire and the Blitz.

‘Never before or since has Britain ever been in a more disturbed and perilous state’: records Tacitus, later, on the state of the Roman province at this time, and it is worth recalling that Tacitus had a first-hand witness to the events and emotions of that terrible period in his father-in-law, then a young man and a
member of Suetonius’ staff. With the veterans and their families massacred, a
colonia
burned to the ground, at least part of a Roman legion wiped out – a minimum of two thousand men – and now a populous merchant city abandoned, it is difficult to see that Tacitus was exaggerating.

Indeed, if the Boudican revolt was the second most serious provincial rising in this century, for a parallel to the Roman situation on the abandonment of Londinium it is suggested that one should go back a hundred years to Gaul.
¹⁶
Here the young champion of the Arverni, Vercingetorix, defeated Caesar at Gergovia in 52
BC,
and at the head of a general army of the Gauls very nearly succeeded in throwing the Roman yoke off altogether.

The lamentations of the helpless inhabitants of Londinium had not been misplaced. Their city was to be destroyed and they themselves were to be sacrificed, in certain cases quite literally so. From the very first, serious excavations of the city of London – beginning in 1915 but with a rapid increase after the First World War – have indeed provided startling evidence of the violent demolition of an earlier foundation in the middle of the first century
AD
.
¹⁷

The process of discovery, in connection with the building and rebuilding in this area, has continued in various phases ever since, with the depredations of the Blitz during the Second World War providing of course ripe opportunities. If not all of these were taken in the past – where archaeological discovery is concerned one might well adapt the words of Thomas Hood concerning a noted sportsman: ‘What he hit is history; what he missed is mystery’ – fortunately the present climate is increasingly favourable to co-operative ventures between archaeologist and developer.
^f1

In this way fragments of burned roofing tiles, wood ash conveniently accompanied by burned coins of the reign of Claudius – seventeen such bronze coins were discovered at a depth of seventeen feet when Lloyds Bank was built – burned grain from a merchant’s stock he could not carry away, burned Samian ware, all these have provided mute testimony of the great fire which finally completed the holocaust of London. The civilized homes of the wealthy businessmen, made of timber and some clay, with their white plaster work, some of it decorated with colours, with their thatched roofs and their wooden floorboards, burned merrily. The elegant pots, the amphorae for the Greek wine and the Spanish oil, the decorated pottery lamps imported from the Mediterranean, all these witnesses to the sophisticated tastes of the first Londoners were first smashed by desecrating hands then baked in a furnace of destruction. The fact that some of these houses even had running water by this date would have been of little significance in view of the fiery furnace which now engulfed the centre of the city: it has been estimated from tests on burned Samian ware that the heat must have been in excess of 1,000°C (to be compared with the similarly estimated heat in the firestorms in Hamburg during the 1943 bombings, with all the additional aid of high explosives).
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